OLD HOUSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 September 1939, Page 5

OLD HOUSES

TRANSPLANTED TO NEW SITES. Strassburg has found a solution for the problem of what to do with its old houses, which arc particularly beautiful and famous. It is never with a light heart that a municipality anywhere, before the pressing needs of modern traffic, sets the housebreaker to pull down some ancient building. In Strassburg such houses when pulled down are set up again in a part of one of its old quarters, where they take their place next to old friends. One of the last of these transfers .is that of an old house which stood at 7. rue d’Or and which, after disappearing, has now risen again complete in the rue du Maroquin, where five other old houses of Strassburg had preceded it. Its sculptured timbers date from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The transplanted old houses surround a courtyard where a garden will be formed after the fashion of the Middle Ages and in the interior of the houses a museum is to be set installed, of which ten rooms will be devoted to sculpture of the Middle Ages, two to stained glass, and fifteen te ancient furniture and the lesser arts./ the collections covering a period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.